My Favorite Supplement to Improve Focus & Performance

So, second thing I've been doing recently is a supplement. I don't usually take supplements, but I was looking at the amount of meat that I'm eating these days, and it's not as much as I used to. I still eat about a pound, maybe a pound and a half of meat per day, but I've included more carbohydrates in my diet recently from orange juice, from other fruit juices. I juiced some cantaloupe, some watermelon today. I have a lot of honey in my raw milk, which I get here in Costa Rica at the farmers market. And I'm doing more carbohydrates, a moderate amount of fat, and a little bit less protein these days. Just kind of experimenting with it. I'm still getting around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, but more of that protein is coming from milk, and less of it is coming from meat. So, I was thinking maybe I should try and supplement with creatine. When I dove back into the research with creatine, it's just incredibly overwhelming in a good way how beneficial this substance is for humans. If you don't know about creatine, it's made in the human body from arginine and glycine and then methylated with something called SAM E. I will return to talking about SAM E later in this podcast, but we don't make enough of it to be optimal. Even those of us who are omnivores can benefit from creatine supplementation unless we are getting probably upwards of two pounds of meat per day for men or one and a half plus pounds of meat per day for women. These studies consistently show benefits in terms of cognition. Even in people who are not aging or have cognitive decline, but certainly in people who have cognitive decline, creatine is beneficial for muscle recovery, for exercise performance. There's about a 10 to 20% benefit in terms of exercise performance, for intense exercise. In terms of memory tasks, card sorting, all sorts of things like this, 5 to 15% benefit with creatine supplementation. The biggest benefits from creatine supplementation are definitely seen in vegans and vegetarians who are probably getting around zero grams of creatine per day. And that I think is a striking statistic in and of itself. It is not a dishonest statement to say that creatine supplementation makes vegans and vegetarians smarter. Choose your longevity vegan or vegetarian of choice these days and they are almost certainly taking creatine. A nod to the animal kingdom. they probably should just be eating meat and they would be getting all of the other things they're also taking among their 100 plus pills depending who you're looking at. Um, many of which are from animal foods. But I've started adding around five grams of creatine to my diet per day. And I notice benefits in terms of mental clarity and exercise performance while I'm surfing. Interestingly, I'm probably getting around two grams of creatine a day from my food, maybe two and a half. The body does make some creatine, but it's only about half of what we need to be optimal. So, if someone tells you that you can make all the creatine you need, that's really clearly not been shown in studies. No matter what you're eating, most of us can benefit from supplementation with creatine, but you can get enough from your diet if you are a hyper carnivore. So, many of the people in the carnivore community will rejoice when they're eating pounds of meat per day and tell me I'm not eating enough meat and that I should return to being a strict carnivore. But fact of the matter is, I feel better eating more carbohydrates and diversifying my diet. And a little bit of creatine supplementation is pretty easy for me. Like I said, I notice benefits in terms of mental clarity, mental performance, memory recall, mental sharpness, and exercise performance with surfing, which is mostly paddling. I will skateboard sometimes. I'll do moderate amounts of body weight lifting, and occasional lifting of weights, and I notice benefits in all of those areas. Creatine is incredibly cheap. There's really no downsides. Doses of up to 20 to 30 grams per day have been studied for five years in humans or more. That's an incredible statistic to have five years of study of people taking that much creatine with no downsides. There is something to note if you're going to take creatine though, which is that when you go to your doctor, your creatinine, which is a breakdown product of creatine in the muscles, will be elevated or may be elevated above what you've seen in the past. This doesn't mean that your kidneys are failing. Though elevated creatinine can in some individuals be linked to kidney issues. If you are supplementing with creatine or eating a lot of meat, the chances that this is related to your kidneys are very low. the chances it's related to more production of creatinine from creatine breakdown in your muscles are much higher and creatinine itself is not harmful to the human body. We use it in medicine only as a metric of the function of the kidneys. Again, it's not harmful to you. So, if you're going to a doctor and getting your blood work, most notably a comprehensive metabolic panel, you'll want to get something called a cyaten C, which is not affected by the amount of meat you're eating and will give you a good secondary indication of your kidney function. Hearkening back to some of the things I talked about earlier, I think that everyone should be getting a fasting insulin on their blood work and a homocyine. One of the ways that I could tell that my methylation cycle, my folate cycle were not working as efficiently as I would like was my homoyine ranged anywhere from 10, 11 to 12. It's much higher than I want to see it. I think optimal homoyine levels are probably below 8 for most people. You can push your homoyine too low, but I think that around eight, seven to eight is probably optimal. So when I do these things, when I supplement with creatine, when I think about riboflavin from heart and when I am getting enough folate in my diet, predominantly in my case from fruit, um, orange juice, passion fruit, watermelon, that's the main source of folate that I'm getting also from liver and egg yolks, then my homoyine will be in that range. If I slack on those things, I don't get as many organs, I don't get as much creatine in my diet, then I see my homoyine go a little bit higher and I don't want that to be the case. So I'm trying to optimize there as well. It's also important to mention that around 50% 50% of the SAM E the acidenosyl methionine generated from the methylation cycle goes to making creatine in your body. So taking a small amount of creatine per day may benefit you in terms of easing the body's work to methylate. A lot of methylation efforts also go to making choline a nutrient that can be found in animal foods predominantly. So, if you're eating a lot of meat or doing a moderate amount of supplementation of creatine and doing some choline from egg yolks or liver or meat, you're going to optimize your methylation just fine with your diet. But checking homoyine doesn't hurt and seeing how you feel overall is a good indicator of how well all of that is working. The majority of your creatine is stored in your muscles, though heart, brain, and testicles also have significant amounts of creatine. Vegetarian muscles are about 20 to 30% lower in creatine than omnivore muscles. an indication, like I mentioned, that they can use more creatine. Again, I tweeted something today that given the massive amount of research on the benefits of creatine. I don't know how anyone can make any argument that a plant-based diet is better for human health. But regardless, plant-based advocates continue to try, making all sorts of propagandized Netflix documentaries that are misleading more and more people and leading to all sorts of deficiencies in the human population. But it's okay. Vegan and vegetarian diets are something that I respect. They're intentional choices with regard to diet. And I know that many of those people will come back to eating meat and eventually find good health. In fact, a striking statistic to consider is that the vast majority of people who go vegan return to eating meat within four years. And the majority of those people cite health problems as the main reason to returning to eat meat. So, I think that making intentional choices with regard to your diet is an incredible thing you can do with regard to your health. even if that's vegan or vegetarian, I'm just glad that those people are thinking about food and there's enough good content out there to get them back to health with eating meat eventually. So, I'm sure there's a lot of recovering vegans and vegetarians even listening to this right now. In terms of protocols for creatine supplementation, I think the literature supports a couple of different things. If you want to quickly saturate your muscles in your body with creatine for optimal performance across multiple areas of function, a protocol that is widely discussed is five grams of creatine four times a day for 5 to seven days. You can also do 3 to five grams of creatine for about 30 days to saturate your body with creatine in the stores. Now, that will cost you pennies per day. So, I think it's worth it for most people. There's lots of good brands out there that have certificates of analysis showing that they are pretty darn clean sources. So, creatine is interesting. It's something I've been experimenting with. Like I said, I don't usually do supplementation, but when I'm tweaking the amount of protein in my diet from the meat and using other sources for other benefits, uh adding a little bit of creatine back in seems to be a beneficial thing. And uh I think most vegans and vegetarians need to do that as well. Or they can just go back to eating meat. So, or they could eat some lineage meat sticks, which they'd probably feel really good on. [Music]